eBook

English

08/08/2023

A grieving daughter's search for her mother becomes a journey across alternate realities in this wildly entertaining, reality-bending thriller from the author of The Shining Girls.It was a game they played; the other worlds, the other lives. It was part of her mom's grand delusions. It wasn't real. Unless it was…  Bridget Kittinger has always been paralyzed by choices. It has a lot to do with growing up in the long shadow of her mother, Jo, a troubled neuroscientist. Jo's obsession with one mythical object, the "dreamworm"-which she believed enabled travel to other worlds-led to their estrangement. Now, suddenly, Jo is dead. And in packing up her home, Bridge finds a strange device buried deep in Jo's freezer: the dreamworm. Against all odds, it actually can open the door-to all other realities, and to all other versions of herself, too. Could Bridge find who she should be in this world, by visiting the others? And could her Jo still be alive somewhere? But there's a sinister cost to trading places, and others hunting the dreamworm who would kill to get their hands on it . . . Across a thousand possible lives, from Portland to Haiti, from Argentina to the alligator-infested riverways of North Carolina, Bridge takes readers on a highly original thrill ride, pushing the boundaries of what we know about mothers and daughters, hunters and seekers, and who we each choose to be. Lauren Beukes is the award-winning and internationally best-selling author of The Shining Girls, which has been adapted by AppleTV+, as well as Zoo City, Moxyland, Broken Monsters, and Afterland. Her novels have been published in twenty-four countries, and she's also a screenwriter, comics writer, journalist and award-winning documentary maker. She lives in London with two trouble cats and her daughter. "Lauren Beukes' multiverse is sheer thrilling madness with a big, beating heart that reminds us that we're all connected in the end."-Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires and How To Sell a Haunted House "Lauren Beukes takes a story filled with psychedelic drugs, parallel worlds, and neuroscience and makes it also about a complex mother-daughter relationship, full of darkness, light, and longing. This is fun and insane and very moving."  -Mariana Enriquez, author of Our Share of Night "I absolutely loved it. This fantastic high-wire act of a novel, accelerating to a heart-stopping climax, is at once a cosmic narrative on a grand scale and a deeply intimate human story."-Catriona Ward, bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street "Bridge spiders out into alternate universes, alternate selves, yet manages to be very much about us and our fractured now. It's a humane, thought-provoking puzzle box, and a wildly entertaining novel."-Paul Tremblay, bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club "What if our dreams are twisted-up memories? What if the Mandela Effect isn't an effect at all? Somewhere between The Lathe of Heaven and Everything Everywhere All at Once is Lauren Beukes' Bridge: it's not just reality that's multifold, it's identity. Bridge challenges our sense of reality, chips away at our conception of the self, and shoves us down a slide of our own paranoia. But, it's Lauren Beukes-this is what she does, isn't it?"-Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians Praise for Afterland "A smartly written thriller that opens with a satisfying bang . . . Beukes is all about turning assumptions and expectations upside down."  -Stephen King, New York Times Book Review, on Afterland "Bowstring-taut, visceral, and incredibly timely: Beukes's plague-tale is a parable about the glory and terror of Americanism in times of calamity."-Cory Doctorow, author of Walkaway and Little Brother, on Afterland "Beukes's imagined